Photograph by: Ric Ernst
, PNG

The more you watch the Montreal Alouettes try to play football without Anthony Calvillo, the guiltier the B.C. Lions look.

Not for what they did Sunday — you can only eat what’s put in front of you, and the Leos mostly devoured the ever out-of-sync visitors from the Eastern time zone, 36-14, at BC Place — but rather for ever letting Tanner Marsh beat them deep, back on Aug. 22.

Of all the brain cramps the Lions suffered in that erratic first half of the season, that’s the one that still sticks in the craw: allowing a raw replacement — backup to the backup to the concussed Calvillo — to hit receiver Eric Deslauriers for 57 yards on the game’s final offensive play, leaving 1.9 seconds for Sean Whyte to kick the winning field goal in 39-38 Montreal victory.

How this ever could have happened, based on what we saw Sunday, is nigh-on incomprehensible.

The now 4-7 Als, minus Calvillo, may yet make the playoffs by the grace of an appalling run of play early by the last-place Eastern team, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, but GM/interim head coach Jim Popp looks like a poker player with a hand full of nothing as he tries to figure out if he can win with a bluff.

He used all three QBs at his disposal Sunday — first Marsh, then Troy Smith, finally Josh Neiswander — and if he’d had a couple more on the roster, he’d probably have used them, too.

The Lions won’t be in anywhere near that bad a condition if Travis Lulay — who lowered his right shoulder to bull into the end zone for a fourth-quarter touchdown and left the game with his throwing arm hanging like a wet noodle — is gone for a while.

That’s because they traded for veteran Buck Pierce just last week in what may yet look like a piece of scary prescience, and what’s more, after Lulay exited Sunday, Thomas DeMarco came in and played a near-flawless stretch: reading and beating blitzes, running for a first down, throwing a TD pass to Marco Iannuzzi, and just generally settling the nerves of Lions’ fans who had feared the worst when Lulay went down.

“The thing about Thomas is he’s always been resilient, always found a way to respond, and he did an outstanding job. He made the right reads, made the right throws, protected the ball,” said Lions coach Mike Benevides.

“You hear the term ‘the game’s not too big for him’ — well, that’s a situation where the momentum can switch, and he did what he had to do. And I’m proud of him, and that’s why in the locker-room, they gave him a (game) ball, as well, and there was a ‘Tommy’ chant. You can tell the guys pull for him, and that’s important.”

Even so, Lulay’s injury, if it’s more serious than the always upbeat quarterback was letting on to reporters, is going to make it exponentially more difficult for the 7-4 Lions to shake off the bad habits of the first 10 games.

Lowering the shoulder at the goal-line, running squarely into the tackle of Als cornerback Geoff Tisdale, wasn’t the wisest of courses for a quarterback with a history of shoulder trouble.

“No, honestly, no. You can’t have any regrets,” said Lulay, who had a terrific first half then lost the thread in the third quarter and ended the day with three interceptions.

“I thought that was a critical point, we felt like we had a touchdown on the defence and (Dante Marsh, who had intercepted Neiswander) stepped out of bounds. And on first down (from the Montreal 3) I lost my footing, I wanted to throw the football away and we lost yardage, so we owed it to the team to score there. I had to find a way to get in the end zone.”

Benevides agreed, though he might not be so OK with it if Lulay’s out for any length of time.

“Well, if you have a situation where he can step out of bounds, fine, but in a goal-line play, he’s going to take it, he’s going to play the game,” said the coach. “You can’t hold him back from doing those types of things. The game is played, and those things happen.”

Lulay called the injury a “tweak.” It looked a lot worse than that.

“I don’t know. Honestly, it’s too fresh to tell. It happened about 30 minutes ago. It’s stiff right now from the ice. It felt funny. But that’s why we decided to shut it down, with a couple-score lead.

“It stung right away. It was a natural reaction not to move it yet. So we had the trainers look at it, and you can see it’s moving around OK,” he said, demonstrating some mobility for the assembled media. “I’m optimistic how it feels right now. We’ll see how it settles down.”

Popp lost his stud, Calvillo, a month ago and knows how difficult it can be to get the team to function under a backup, although his Nos. 2, 3, and 4 QBs are so inexperienced, it’s sometimes painful to watch.

“We sputtered. We’re not executing well,” said Popp, who fired coach Dan Hawkins on Aug. 1 and took over the reins himself. “That’s why we put Josh in, and he executed a little better, but ... there were interceptions that resulted in two touchdowns, so, we can’t have that.

“It’s growing pains. But even when Anthony was on the field early in the season, you could see it was growing pains. We have all new coaches on offence, they’ve been running different things, they’ve adjusted it three times, it’s just a work in progress.

“Early on (after Calvillo’s injury), we had some success; people probably didn’t know how to defend us with the new quarterbacks. Maybe they’re catching up to us a little bit, and now we’ve got to turn the tide back on them. We don’t just have rookie quarterbacks, we have other rookies on the field and sometimes trying to get them all on the same page isn’t quite as easy.”

The Lions, for their part, will take the win, but hopefully won’t be deluded into thinking their woes are behind them. Specials teams were terrific, but the offence blew a tire under Lulay coming out of halftime (he passed for minus-1 yard before leaving the game.) The defence played well for the most part, but frankly gets tested harder by the scout team in practice.

And three DBs looked lackadaisical on Neiswander’s second TD pass, a 35-yard weave by Brandon London through three half-hearted tackle attempts in the fourth quarter.

Can you really critique a 36-14 win? Only if you think the Lions will need to be a lot better than this against six Western opponents — five of them named Calgary or Saskatchewan — in their remaining eight games.

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